2013-05-23T17:33:04-04:00 Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=mark-fried Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Mark Fried Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3294779 2013-05-18T08:43:23-04:00 2013-05-18T08:43:10-04:00

Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fried/
At hand is a looming deadline in July by which the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are supposed to conform to the WTO agreement on intellectual property, known as the TRIPS Agreement. Approved in 1996, TRIPS sets stringent rules to protect all technology-rich products, including medicines, from competition for up to 25 years.

For the poorest countries, TRIPS constitutes an obstacle to development. It deprives them of following in the footsteps of the rich countries and more recent success stories like Korea, Taiwan, China or Brazil. These all built up their technological capacity and industrialized their economies by copying and experimenting with proprietary technologies. TRIPS outlaws that route to development.

What's more, by allowing monopoly pricing on essential goods like medicines, TRIPS causes direct harm to the poorest people. Government health budgets can't afford to cover key drugs, sick people must impoverish themselves to pay out of pocket, and often they simply die.

Deal threatens nascent industries

After much bellyaching, in 2002 rich countries agreed to allow some flexibility for developing countries, including the right to override patents for public health reasons. They also offered a waiver on TRIPS implementation until July 2013 for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), and that's the deadline now occupying trade negotiators in Geneva.

The LDCs are 50 countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sudan, where Gross National Income is under $1,190 per capita, human development indicators are abysmal, and economies are utterly vulnerable. Their 880 million people include more than half the world's poorest (earning under $1.25 a day).

These countries have no technological base or functioning high-tech markets; and a strict Intellectual Property regime would threaten nascent industries rather than expand the potential for development.
For example, the Indian generics firm Cipla has set up manufacturing facilities to produce quality, low-cost versions of patented medicines in Bangladesh and Uganda. Obliging those countries to implement TRIPS would prevent that industry from continuing, much less flourishing.

What's more, implementing TRIPS is expensive. It would be hard to find a bigger booster of Intellectual Property rights than the members of the Computer and Communication Industry Association. But they understand why TRIPS makes no sense for the poorest countries.

Their spokesman Nick Ashton-Hart wrote: "If you are a policymaker in an LDC, are you likely to believe creating IP systems is the best way to spend your governments' funds, or is concentrating on the basics your people need a better approach?"

Rich countries lined up to say no

Last fall, the LDCs requested that the "transition period" last until the moment a country graduates from LDC status. Virtually all the world agrees. After all, trade rules grant the Least Developed Countries special status because they are vulnerable.

Sadly, the richest countries have lined up to say no. Instead, they want to make a deal that makes LDCs pay for any postponement.

The European Union and the United States have offered a five-year extension. In return the LDCs would be obliged not to reduce their current level of patent protection or their commitment to full implementation of the TRIPS agreement at the end of the five-year period.

That only sounds reasonable if you know nothing about the reality of such desperately poor countries. Why on earth are the richest countries concerned about the ones that together subsist on less than one per cent of the world's wealth?

Canada is said to be seeking to "bridge the gap" between the hard-line US/EU stance and the Least Developed Countries proposal, which by the way enjoys the support of virtually everyone else. Kudos to our negotiators in Geneva, but surely the only fair resolution is to support the permanent waiver the LDCs have asked for.

Heavy arm-twisting is occurring as you read this, but the LDCs are standing firm. The issue will be decided at the TRIPS Council meeting in June.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1453786 2012-04-27T08:39:25-04:00 2012-06-27T05:12:02-04:00

Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fried/ afflicts 225 million people and killed about 650,000 in 2010.

First the good tidings: In the last decade, deaths from malaria have been cut by one third in Africa and the number of at-risk people contracting the disease globally has fallen by 17 per cent.

The worrying news is rumours of an about-face in Canadian policy that would divert millions in scarce aid money to a risky experiment, while proven strategies go unfunded.

The UK Guardian was right to cite malaria control as "one of the most notable achievements of international aid." Much of the credit goes to two initiatives: the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative. They have enabled massive distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying, and access to free diagnosis and medicine via trained community health workers.

Yet this success is fragile. Cuts to aid budgets led the Global Fund to cancel its latest funding round, casting severe doubt on the ability of developing countries to maintain, much less scale up, their malaria control efforts.

The logical move would be to redouble Canada's contributions to such proven interventions. Instead, CIDA is said to be contemplating a $20 million grant to the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm), a pilot project run out of the Global Fund.

AMFm is a controversial experiment to try to reach more people with ACT, the latest anti-malarial medication, by selling it at a subsidized price in local shops. Due to inadequacies in public health systems, the majority of poor malaria sufferers buy medicine at such corner stores, where it is sold off the shelf along with cooking oil and sugar.

Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT) is currently the only effective malaria treatment that exists, since the parasites have become resistant to the more inexpensive medicines chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine.

Corner Store "Doctors"

Innovation is laudable, but not all experiments make sense. To its credit, since its inception in 2010, AMFm has managed to negotiate hefty price reductions from drug manufacturers. But that did not allay the concerns voiced by many NGOs, the U.S. government and -- until now anyway -- the Canadian government regarding the risks of AMFm's approach and whether it offers value for money.

The first problem is the initiative's reliance on unqualified and unregulated shopkeepers to diagnose the disease and prescribe the medicine. Such corner store "doctors" commonly sell malaria drugs to anyone complaining of a fever -- missing other killer diseases like respiratory infection, which remains the main cause of child mortality. What a scandal when poor families sacrifice their meagre earnings to pay for the wrong medicine for their children.

The second problem arises when the shopkeeper gets the diagnosis right. AMFm presumes that poor people will pay for the full treatment if the price is subsidized. The reality is that when medicine is not free, people living in poverty purchase pills as they can afford them, often taking less than a full course of treatment.

Such mistreatment vastly increases the likelihood the malaria parasite will become resistant to ACT, which is the only effective malaria medicine left. This was the sad story of chloroquine -- an excellent malaria drug now rendered useless in Africa precisely because of incomplete treatment.

The first cases of resistance to ACT were identified a few years ago along the Thai-Cambodia border where resistance to chloroquine first emerged over 50 years ago). Alarmingly, recent research has found more cases of ACT resistance on the Thai-Burmese border.

Guard Aid Dollars

Containing resistance should be a global priority, and donors should steer clear of experiments that put that effort at risk.

Sadly, the problems with AMFm don't stop there. Last year, uncontrolled ordering by AMFm buyers threatened to destabilize the market for ACT and in the process depleted the initiative's funding. For example, buyers in Zanzibar, a country where malaria has almost been eliminated, ordered over 240,000 treatments when the number of malaria cases is only around 10,000 per year.

Spending of precious aid dollars should be guided by evidence of what works. In the case of malaria, the evidence is overwhelming: delivering professional services and medicines free of charge via trained community health workers or primary health clinics has achieved historic progress in countries across the globe.

That is what the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was set up to do and does well. Given cuts to CIDA's overall aid budget, I worry that the money for a new grant to AMFm would be subtracted from Canada's proud and steady support for the Global Fund's proven malaria-control programs.

Canada would be wise to listen to its allies and partners, and stick to financing malaria-control programs that work.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1336802 2012-03-12T10:52:03-04:00 2012-05-12T05:12:01-04:00

Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fried/
As Gandhi's dictum has it: First they ignored us, then they mocked us, and then we won!

For years, our calls fell on deaf ears. When I first lobbied officials at Canada's ministry of finance on the issue, they just nodded their heads. A year later, they called our proposal reckless; such a sale would so upset the gold market, it should never be considered.

In 2007, however, IMF staff began to toy with the idea, not as a source of debt relief, but a way to address a shortfall in the Fund's operating budget. The institution was facing hard times; there was little uptake for its lending except from the poorest countries that could barely afford to repay.

An action they had derided as financial tomfoolery suddenly made economic sense. The cash could help cover staff salaries, and would come in handy for the major renovations planned for the Fund's downtown Washington offices.

In early 2008, when the price of gold was $850 an ounce, the IMF proposed selling 12.8 million ounces of its holdings over a two-year period. The proceeds would create a $7 billion endowment to generate income for its activities.

In the wake of the financial crisis later that year, of course, the IMF received a new lease on life, with all sorts of countries demanding loans and a huge influx of new capital.

The crisis also created a gaping fiscal hole in the budgets of the poorest countries, pushing them farther into the red even as they slashed public services. Sierra Leone's debt to the rest of the world, for example, doubled between 2008 and 2011. Last year the country's government spent more on debt repayment than on healthcare.

There was a third, unexpected consequence of the crisis: Gold prices went through the roof. The IMF sold over 7 million ounces of gold during 2009, and earned a windfall of almost $1.44 billion over and above the $7 billion they expected for the endowment.

At that point, Canadian officials told me they thought the money should be used to help poor countries. The rest of the IMF Board agreed, earmarking most of the windfall profit (almost $900 million) for lending to low-income countries -- not to lower their debts, but at least not for the institution's overhead.

By the time the IMF finished selling off the bullion at the end of 2010, the price of gold had risen to over $1,000 an ounce and the total windfall had ballooned to $3.6 billion.

We insisted that the entire windfall be used for debt relief. With our allies in the Jubilee Campaign, the ONE Campaign, the International Trade Union Confederation and others, we delivered tens of thousands of petitions from 60 partners around the globe.

In late February, the IMF Board came much of the way around, agreeing to use $1.1 billion of the remaining windfall to cover the interest payments on existing IMF loans for the poorest countries through 2014.

More than a billion dollars, which governments would have paid in interest, can now be invested in small-scale farming, education and health care. This will change people's lives.

Nearly $1.2 billion in gold windfall is still up for grabs, so we cannot rest easy. But here is a victory to be celebrated.

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Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fried/
The Arms Trade Treaty would be the first ever global attempt to keep conventional weapons and ammunition, which kill or maim hundreds of thousands of people every year, from falling into the hands of tyrants and criminals. It would oblige all countries to analyze the likely impact of weapons shipments they export or import, or which pass through their territory, and stop any that would reasonably be expected to fuel conflict, poverty, or human rights abuses.

The Treaty's strongest champions are countries that have suffered the pain and sorrow of armed conflict, particularly in West Africa, and of drug-related crime, such as Mexico. They've been buttressed by the Control Arms Campaign, jointly led in Canada by Project Ploughshares, Oxfam, and Amnesty International, which has kept up public pressure in over 100 countries.

Nearly six years have passed since we campaigners celebrated a United Nations vote to begin the treaty process. The negotiations have not been easy. The world's largest arms exporters, including the United States, China, and Russia, have given only grudging support, and have raised procedural obstacles throughout.

Last week's talks were nearly derailed by a disagreement over the meaning of consensus: Does it give every country the right to veto the final treaty? Or does it mean all should accept the views of a large majority? A deal brokered behind closed doors reaffirmed the latter view, but key players say they will opt out if the treaty is not to their liking.

Diplomats face the same conundrum as in the global climate negotiations: A true consensus would produce a much weaker treaty than a majority view, as provisions get watered down to keep countries in the tent. Conversely, a strong and effective treaty may chase away the most important ones, the big arms exporters.

Canada was an early supporter of the treaty process, endorsing soon after the Conservative government took office in 2006, and it has consistently worked to promote a rapid negotiation process.

Prime Minister Harper, however, has never commented on the matter. And last summer, in an apparent attempt to mollify domestic constituencies, Canada proposed exempting hunting and sporting rifles from the treaty, citing the fact that they are legal in Canada.

Such rifles are the drug barons' weapons of choice, as a Latin American delegate pointed out. And calling for exemptions for transfers that Canada considers "legal" invites other states to do the same. The ATT needs common standards because each state's own vary widely. Look at Russia's recent declaration that it will continue to make "legal" transfers of weapons to the Syrian regime.

All the same, the Chair's Draft Papers, written by Ambassador Roberto García Moritán of Argentina and endorsed last week, offer a good basis for a strong outcome. They outline a treaty that would include all non-nuclear weapons and ammunition, would require tracking of all weapons exports and imports, and would base the criteria for judging transfers on solid human rights principles.

During the hours the diplomats huddled over the treaty, some 10,000 people died from armed violence. A killing every minute. Conventional arms are the real weapons of mass destruction.

The momentum is there to end that tragedy. But it will take a groundswell of public pressure to succeed. The Control Arms Campaign has a global online petition. If enough Canadians sign on, perhaps Harper will stop playing politics and back an Arms Trade Treaty with bite.


]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1214223 2012-01-20T15:48:34-05:00 2012-03-21T05:12:01-04:00

Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fried/
These countries are increasingly rich -- and at the same time outrageously poor. All of them grew their economies over the past 20 years, but how well growth translated into freedom from poverty varied enormously.

Korea, Mexico, and Brazil were great success stories, while South Africa and India ended up with more poor people today than when they began. Contrary to popular myth, a rising economic tide does not necessarily lift all boats, and can in fact sink some of them.

In a new report called "Left Behind by the G20?" Oxfam crunches the numbers, and finds that inequality -- the rallying cry of the Occupy movement -- helps explain the difference. Not just how unequal countries were when they started growing, but whether the way they grew made them more equal or less equal.

In decades past, development economists viewed inequality as an unavoidable outcome of progress and even a necessary ingredient for growth. Now, a mass of recent evidence from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank shows the opposite: that inequality can be reduced while an economy grows, and more important, that inequality acts as a brake on growth.

The logic is straightforward: If the richest 10 per cent get all the benefits of growth it won't have much of an impact on the poorest. What's more, people trapped in poverty add little to a country's GDP. Inequality in access to credit, for example, can prevent these individuals from making productive investments. Inequality in access to education and healthcare prevents them from realizing their productive potential.

Oxfam offers a report card for all G20 countries except Saudi Arabia. Only four have managed to reduce income inequality since 1990 and they are all emerging powers: Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and Argentina. Inequality increased fastest in Russia, China, Japan, and South Africa.

While starting from a much lower level, inequality in Canada rose as fast as India's and nearly as fast as South Africa's. Notably, over the same period, inequality fell in most low-income countries, substantially so in Mali, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia.

South Africa, a booming economy with rising poverty, is the most unequal country in the G20. Oxfam's economic modeling predicts that even with steady growth over the next decade more than a million more South Africans will be pushed into poverty, unless inequality is addressed.

Korea is now the most equal country in the G20 save France. If Brazil and Mexico, which have combined growth with reduced inequality, manage to further reduce their levels of inequality to that of Indonesia (close to the G20 median) they could cut the number of people living in poverty by 90 per cent in the space of a decade.

Many factors influence income distribution, especially gender. Even in the world's richest countries, women's wages lag far behind men's. Oxfam identifies five key policies G20 governments have used effectively to reduce inequality: cash transfers to the poorest; universal health and education; progressive taxation; removal of barriers to equal rights and opportunities for women; and land reform.

All governments have the power to close the distance between richest and poorest. Reducing inequality multiplies the impact of economic growth on poverty, and frees formerly poor people to contribute their energy and assets. Reducing inequality is not only morally right, it makes economic sense.


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Mark Fried http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fried/ ugly ducklings Canada, Japan and Russia, appeared ready to embrace a second commitment period under Kyoto, with additional targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And all but the U.S. seemed prepared to get the new Green Climate Fund up and running by this time next year.

However, the agreement within grasp was a feeble one. It would postpone for a decade the key aim of reducing the gap between pledged reductions in carbon emissions and the reductions scientists say are needed before 2020 if we are to avoid dramatic shifts in the climate. And it might leave the Green Fund an empty shell, bereft of revenue to help communities reeling from climate change.

There was no guarantee even this weak agreement could be pulled off.

For different reasons, governments were converging around a 2020 timeline for a post-Kyoto agreement. The U.S. seemed to be stonewalling, unwilling to negotiate anything before 2020. China was open to taking on legally binding commitments after 2020. Even pro-Kyoto Europe believed a new agreement would not enter into force until 2020. Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent, to his credit, called for a new agreement by 2015.

Alongside the refusal of the ugly ducklings to commit to a second Kyoto period, the 2020 timeline has grave consequences for keeping global warming below the two degree target already agreed, let alone the 1.5 degree limit scientists say is needed. Emissions have to peak in 2015 and fall sharply thereafter if we are to avoid the worst of Nature's lash.

Tipping Point in Sight
The options on the table did not add up to enough to close the gigatonne gap -- options such as capping emissions from international transport, extracting mitigation pledges from Argentina or Saudi Arabia, or moving countries that have made a range of pledges to the top-end of the range.

Only a new round of more ambitious reductions would be sufficient to close it. A 2020 timeline effectively would lock in the inadequate targets agreed in Copenhagen, and push the world towards, if not over, the tipping point.

On the Green Climate Fund, there were bitter exchanges. But this appeared to be grandstanding to seek leverage in other areas of the negotiations. Provided the rest of the package came together, the Fund would be launched, though there was as yet no agreement on the sources of revenue to fill it.

A levy on maritime shipping that could raise $25 billion a year remained in the draft text, despite U.S. opposition and Canada's silence. But for how long? And if emissions continue their runaway growth for another decade, how could any amount of funding allow vulnerable communities to adapt?

As we enter Durban's final day, an agreement seems plausible on a second period under the legally-binding Kyoto deal -- without Canada -- and a pathway to a new, wider legal agreement in 2020. This would at least lay a basis for future expansion, though it would do little to close the emissions gap in the coming decade. The Green Climate Fund could be launched but its funding hung in the balance.

Other scenarios are equally plausible. Governments that take climate change seriously could choose to defer, hoping more favourable political conditions will emerge over the coming year. Or a dramatic final plenary could end in collapse.

I'm an optimist by nature. An inadequate agreement is certainly preferable to none, as long as it leaves open the potential for improvement. Collapse would mean more hunger and suffering for the world's poorest people.

Mark Fried is policy coordinator at Oxfam Canada
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